Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or diffe… - Lev Grossman

And I think I've figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything."
"Historically speaking," Alice said, "when people have said that they've almost always been wrong.

He couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

Specifically she was into dragons.
Quentin suppose it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons.